The Belter colonists from Ganymede had spent months on the
“No, I won’t,” he said, deciding not to revisit the argument. “But there it is.”
“Amos will look after you.”
“Great,” Holden said. “I’ll land in the middle of the tensest situation in
“You might need that,” she said, her fingers tracing some of the scars he’d picked up over the last couple years. She stopped at a dark spot on his stomach. “You still taking your cancer meds?”
“Every day.”
“Have their doctor look at this after you land.”
“Okay.”
“They’re using you,” she said as if they’d been talking about it all along.
“I know.”
“They know this is all going to go wrong. There’s no solution that doesn’t leave someone angry and out in the cold. That’s why they’re sending you. You’re an easy scapegoat. They hired you because you won’t hide anything, but that’s the same thing that makes you easy to blame for the inevitable failure of these talks.”
“If I thought it was inevitable I wouldn’t have taken the job,” Holden said. “And I know why they hired me for this. It’s not because I’m the most qualified. But I’m not quite the idiot they think I am. I think I’ve learned a few new tricks.”
Naomi reached up and pulled a hair out of his temple. Before he could say “ouch” she held it up in front of him. It was the gray of damp ashes.
“Old dog,” she said.
~
The flight to Ilus was grueling in more ways than just the long periods at high g. Every time the
Their argument that only the sale of their lithium ore could make them a viable colony, and that the blockade of the shipment was effectively starving them out, was, however, a compelling one. RCE continued to insist that since they had the UN charter, the mining rights and the load of lithium in orbit were theirs.
“A thousand new worlds to explore, and we’re still fighting over resources,” Holden said to no one after a particularly long and angry message from the RCE legal counsel on the
Alex, who was lounging at the ops station nearby, answered anyway. “Well, I guess lithium is like real estate. Nobody’s makin’ any more of it.”
“You did hear the part about a thousand new worlds, right?”
“Maybe some of ’em have more lithium, but maybe they don’t. And this one definitely does. People used to think gold was worth fightin’ over, and that shit gets made by every supernova, which means pretty much every planet around a G2 star will have some. Stars burn through lithium as fast as they make it. All the
Holden sighed and aimed an air vent at his face. The cool breeze from the recyclers made his scalp tingle. The ship wasn’t hot. The sweat had to be coming from stress.
“We’re astonishingly shortsighted.”
“Just you and me?” Alex said, exaggerating his drawl to make a joke of it.
“A vast new frontier has opened up for us. We have the chance to create a new society, with untold riches beyond every gate. But
Alex nodded, but didn’t reply.
“I feel like I need to be there right now,” Holden continued after a moment. “I’m worried by the time we land everyone will be so locked into their positions that we won’t be able to help.”
“Huh,” Alex said, then laughed. “You think we’re going there to help?”
“I think I am. I’ll be down in engineering if anyone needs me.”
“One hour to burn,” Alex replied to his back.